Andrew Johns’ damning second dig at timid NSW

NSW legend Andrew Johns has taken a second swing at NSW for their Origin II sins, exposing a much deeper issue for coach Laurie Daley.

Hard times.

SHATTERED rugby league immortal Andrew Johns has taken an extraordinary second dig at NSW for their Origin Game 2 sins.

The NSW legend was left devastated by a series of Blues blunders in Queensland’s famous 18-16 win at ANZ Stadium and on Wednesday night labelled the second half the “the dumbest half of football NSW have played”.

He saved his most damning appraisal for Thursday, however, suggesting NSW players were frozen with fear and were actively pulling out of getting involved in the play when the game was on the line.

In a similar fashion to rugby league guru Phil Gould’s infamous “selfish” attack on senior NSW players during the 2016 series, Johns said he spotted a number of NSW players who “didn’t want to be involved” as Queensland’s incredible comeback began to gather momentum before they stole the result 18-16 through an unforgettable Johnathan Thurston conversion from near the sideline.

Johns has told Channel 9’s Wide World of Sports, he does not regret his verdict of the Blues’ performance in the second game of the series and instead went harder at Laurie Daley’s side for lacking the heart needed to keep Queensland at bay.

Despite this, Johns still believes NSW can recover and steal the series in Game 3 at Suncorp Stadium on July 12.

“NSW completely lost their way,” Johns said.

“They didn’t target any weaknesses in the Queensland team and when the game was on the line, the worrying thing was a few NSW players sat back and didn’t want to get involved in the play.

Not happy.

“Hopefully there’s some lessons learned, some real harsh lessons for the NSW guys.

“I truly believe they can go up there and win game three but the game was there to win, not only win, but win by a big margin and make a big statement to Queensland to finish the dynasty.

“They’ve given the dynasty life and I’m so disappointed. I was devastated.

“Some questions need to be asked about what went wrong there.”

Johns again labelled the Blues’ failure to target injured Maroons star Thurston as an unforgivable error, especially after the strategy was proven to be successful on the very few occasions NSW tried to make Thurston make tackles with his injured shoulder.

He said captain Boyd Cordner was the only player on the field he witnessed that went out of his way to line up Thurston.

“I said it last night and I’ll stick by it, I think it was the dumbest half of football played by a NSW team,” Johns said.

“They completely went away from what was successful in game one and the first half of game two. They’re playing on a slippery surface at ANZ and they decided to move the ball laterally sideways with these deep block plays which just didn’t put Queensland under any pressure.

“They had the champion Johnathan Thurston, everyone in the stadium could see him, he was lame, he was carrying his shoulder around. So the game plan should have been to sit on JT and pressure JT and run at him as much as possible.

Tough questions.

“I saw one time in the second half where Boyd Cordner got up and looked and Boyd ran 15m sideways to run at JT. JT, he couldn’t even attempt to tackle, and Boyd simply ran at him and pushed forward five or six metres and dropped to the ground and got a quick play-the-ball.’

Johns also criticised NSW’s for going away from its successful plans early in the game to bash Queensland’s forwards up through the middle and cut holes in their defensive line running in the middle of the field.

Just as Queensland did, Johns says NSW were guilty of trying to go around Queensland.

“Then they start going on these elaborate, deep set plays, these block plays,” he said.

“You know what? It’s not a club game. It’s Origin. We’ve been playing club footy for too long at Origin and Queensland defend it well. I can hear them snickering as they do it.”

Johns’ second dig came as NSW star James Maloney defended his team’s composure in the face of the Origin furnace.

Maloney took exception to Johns’ scathing verdict that NSW played dumb football and failed to target Thurston.

Dejected.

Veteran five-eighth Maloney admits the Blues lost their way in the extraordinary fade-out against Queensland and only hoped it would drive them to overturn more than a decade of series-decider misery at Suncorp Stadium next month.

“I wouldn’t say dumb footy,” Maloney countered on Thursday.

“I think we lost our way and probably didn’t play how we needed to.

“We started going laterally and lost a lot of our punch. We need to fix that up.

“But we knew all along we’d decide the result and we did, it was just the wrong way.”

Johns took particular issue with the Blues’ failure to target Thurston, who was clearly struggling with a shoulder injury before he slotted the match-winning conversion.

NRL immortal and Blues legend Johns said the fact NSW didn’t “go at him the whole game” was “rubbish”.

“I think we got him at times,” Maloney said.

“You can’t get bogged down chasing one guy.

“We had a lot of success wearing their middles out.

“When we did that and put them in a corner they lost a lot of options, their backs had to come in and carry them out of trouble so they had no one to move the ball to.”

— with AAP